The arched "mainspring housing" feels better, and spreads the recoil out a bit more. The flat one buries itself into your skin and does what it's told.

SHOT is upon us.

The FNS is Fabrique Nationale’s firstsecondthird newest striker-fired pistol. I won’t bore you with the details, the new non-P guns are not all that FN has hoped for and more. Hammer-fired guns have limited popularity, of late, with both police agencies just as much as with regular people. The FNX guns have a feature-set that most guns won’t catch up with for years to come.

That doesn’t mean they’re great; actually, the less said about the FNX, the better. That’s not to disparage the pistol, but it’s not the thing: the FNS fucks up the FNX. Word.

This gun, barring any unforeseeable “The polymer is cast from some shitty butter” problems, is gonna change games.

Now I know, we’re talking about FN, here. The games FN changes are so far removed from what happens in the rest of the gun world only died-in-the-wool FN fans will ever really know about them. This is a completely ambidextrous gun; not half-ambidextrous, assuming that a slide-rack is good for both correct and sinister. The controls are mirrored perfectly. The backstraps don’t just accommodate different hand sizes, they radically alter the way the gun handles, for both flat and arched straps of standard and embiggened clutches. It shoots like a 1911.

I’m not talking about the grip angle; well, that’s there, too. The ergos are very JMB. No, I’m talking about the trigger. This is the first polymer pistol I’ve fired that could be mistaken for a true single action trigger. I know there are guns out there, the XD, the PPQ, that are geometrically single-action. They’re still spongy, and yes, compared to the FNS, the PPQ is spongy.

The FNS’s trigger might as well be a 1911′s. Sure, with a trigger block and metal-injection-molded bits and pieces, a production 1911 with a bit of a reset on it… But from here on out, there are going to be shooters, not many, but some, who will experience an FNS before they ever handle a Glock, M&P, or XD.

And they’re gonna be all, “Who’s the dickhole that fucked this shit up?”

The FNS isn’t just a win for Fabrique Nationale, it’s a win for polymer pistols altogether. It’s already popular with the very few people who have shot them, including the handful of agencies that test-drove them all 2011. It’s very easy to shoot and shoot fast.

Bruce Schneier’s a security specialist with his own Internet meme. And while most people believe that technology elevates, improves things, Schneier holds that technology magnifies, makes things bigger, good and…